The Serbian Mission Under the Russian Archdiocese

In 1905 the Russian archbishop Tikhon organized the scattered Serbian parishes of North America into a Serbian Mission and set Sebastian Dabović at its head, centered on Holy Resurrection church in Chicago; Tikhon elevated him to archimandrite the same year. The mission he led was a national sub-division of the one Russian-led American Church — and its later history runs into the jurisdictional fragmentation that the 1917 Revolution set in motion, a story the collection tells non-partisanly.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox / American (glorified 2015)

Tikhon’s Multiethnic Vision

When St. Tikhon (Bellavin) became ruling bishop of the Aleutians and North America in 1898, he inherited a diocese that was already multi-ethnic in fact — Russian, Rusyn, Galician, Serbian, Greek, Syro-Arab, and Alaskan native — and he sought structures to match. His characteristic policy was to organize the several nationalities into distinct national missions or auxiliary episcopates, each preserving its own liturgical and parochial life, under the single authority of the American archbishop (see the repository’s Immigrant Era; T. FitzGerald, The Orthodox Church, Praeger, 1995, ch. 3). It was under this policy that St. Raphael was consecrated in 1904 to administer the Arab parishes; and it was under the same policy that Tikhon organized the Serbian parishes and appointed Sebastian to lead them (see Alongside Tikhon and Raphael).

The Serbian Mission of 1905

In 1905 the Serbian parishes of North America — Jackson, the newly founded Holy Resurrection in Chicago, and the others Sebastian and his colleagues had planted — were constituted as a Serbian Orthodox Mission within the Russian archdiocese, with Sebastian as its head (administrator), working from Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church in Chicago as its center (Hieromonk Damascene [Christensen], Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America, St. Herman Press, on the 1905 organization of the Serbian Mission and its Chicago center; OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org, on his appointment as head of the Serbian Mission). In connection with this work he also founded what is described as the first Serbian church newspaper in the United States, an organ for the scattered Serbian parishes (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the Serbian church newspaper). The appointment made Sebastian, in effect, the first ecclesiastical administrator of organized Serbian church life in America — the institutional sense in which he is the “Father of Serbian Orthodoxy in America.”

The same year, in recognition of his labors, Archbishop Tikhon elevated Sebastian to the rank of archimandrite — the senior monastic dignity below the episcopate [Disputed: the sources agree that Tikhon raised him to archimandrite in 1905 but differ on the exact date, some giving August 15, 1905 and others September 18, 1905 (OrthodoxWiki, “Sebastian (Dabovich),” and the Arizona diocesan Life, giving August 15; the St. Herman Press biography giving September 18 — Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich)]. This is the same Tikhon who is the subject of the repository’s St. Tikhon of Moscow collection and who would become Patriarch of Moscow and a confessor-saint; that the future patriarch personally advanced Sebastian is a measure of the esteem in which the Russian hierarchy held its American-born Serbian priest.

A National Mission, Not a Jurisdiction

It is essential to state clearly what the Serbian Mission of 1905 was and was not. It was a national mission within the one Russian-led American diocese, not an independent Serbian jurisdiction. Sebastian’s Serbian parishes were canonically part of the Russian archdiocese; their clergy served under the Russian archbishop; and the Serbian Mission was one of several national sub-divisions of a single church body, exactly parallel to Raphael’s Syro-Arab mission (Stokoe with Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, chs. 2–3; see Tonsure and Ordination). This is the era of the undivided American Church, and Sebastian’s achievement belongs wholly to it. He built Serbian church life inside the unified mission, drawing on its resources and its hierarchy; he did not found a separate Serbian church.

The limits of the arrangement, however, told against its permanence. The Serbian parishes wanted, understandably, the closer connection to the Serbian mother-church and eventually a Serbian hierarchy of their own; but before the First World War the Church of Serbia was in no position to organize and support an American diocese. The biographical tradition records Sebastian’s efforts to secure Serbian ecclesiastical support for the American work, and his frustration when it was not forthcoming; and it records that, around the end of 1909 or in 1910, he resigned as administrator of the Serbian Mission, worn by the jurisdictional complications and the lack of institutional backing (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on his efforts to secure Serbian support and his resignation as administrator c. 1909–1910). He returned to the wider missionary and, soon, chaplaincy work that occupied his last active decades (see Chaplain of the Balkan Wars).

The Fragmentation, Told Non-Partisanly

The Serbian Mission Sebastian founded belongs to the pre-history of a jurisdictional story that the repository treats in full elsewhere, and that this collection reports without taking sides. The Russian Revolution of 1917 severed the American diocese from its mother church and its funding, and the unity that Tikhon had built fractured, over the following decades, into the patchwork of overlapping national jurisdictions that still characterizes American Orthodoxy (see the repository’s Twentieth-Century Fragmentation). The Serbs of America eventually received their own hierarchy: a Serbian Orthodox Diocese in the United States and Canada was organized after the war, its first bishop being Mardarije (Uskoković), consecrated in 1926 and centered at the monastery of St. Sava in Libertyville, Illinois — the same Mardarije who would be glorified together with Sebastian in 2015 (see The Act of 2015). Later in the twentieth century the Serbian Church in America itself underwent a painful internal division (the 1963 schism and its long aftermath), before a reconciliation in the 1990s–2000s (repository, Twentieth-Century Fragmentation).

Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, the collection narrates this history and names its stages without adjudicating among the jurisdictions and parties involved. What matters for Sebastian’s story is that he stands before the fragmentation, at the fountainhead of Serbian church life in America, honored across every jurisdiction that later emerged from it — a figure of the unity that preceded the divisions rather than a partisan of any side within them. His memory, like St. Raphael’s, is invoked as a sign of the one American Church that once was and might again be (see St. Raphael of Brooklyn; and Alongside Tikhon and Raphael).

See Also

References

  • Damascene (Christensen), Hieromonk. Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press. (The 1905 organization of the Serbian Mission and its Chicago center; the Serbian church newspaper; the elevation to archimandrite (September 18, 1905, in this account); the efforts for Serbian support and the resignation c. 1909–1910.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich.” oca.org — used as locator for his appointment as head of the Serbian Mission and the 1905 elevation.
  • “Sebastian (Dabovich).” OrthodoxWiki — used as locator for the August 15, 1905 date of the archimandrite’s elevation.
  • Stokoe, Mark, with Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995, chs. 2–3.
  • FitzGerald, Thomas E. The Orthodox Church. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995, ch. 3.
  • Orthodoxy in America (this repository). The Immigrant Era and Twentieth-Century Fragmentation.